When I was living in a cabin in Ben Lomond nearly 50 years ago, one of the most romantic things about the San Lorenzo Valley was the smell of woodsmoke floating above the river on a cold night. The rich aroma of the redwoods, the quiet mountain air carved by the call of an owl or the spooky cry of a coyote, the primal snap and flash of the blaze in the big brick fireplace — my only heat — combined to create a timeless atmosphere a million miles from the automobilized Los Angeles of my childhood. Between the marijuana keeping me high and the dry oak keeping me warm, there seemed to be something sacred about smoke. Maybe that’s why Native Americans burn sage and the Catholic Church burns incense.

Today the more densely populated valley, where so many homes are still heated with wood, is the most-polluted part of Santa Cruz County even when the trees themselves are not on fire, as just recently when Paradise Park was burning and the smoke made the air downtown unbreathable. No sooner was that little blaze brought under control than a couple hundred miles north the Camp Fire tore through Paradise and sent its toxic plume all the way down to Monterey Bay where sensitive noses, eyes and lungs have been assaulted for weeks on end with the incinerated airborne remains of that town, its people and its surroundings. Even with the windows shut, the irritation in my respiratory system keeps me coughing and sniffling as I write.

This too reminds me of the miasma of L.A. air of the 1950s and ’60s when the smog was so thick some days that it hurt to breathe. Now that emissions of cars have been reduced, the ripple effects of climate change — year-round wildfires and their atmospheric pollution — have parked us all in a smoke-filled garage with no exit. Even the ocean breezes that used to cleanse the air of coastal enclaves like ours are no match for miles of burning wildlands — or worse, cities and suburbs whose plastics and metals, melting, send off a stench akin to what lingered in Lower Manhattan in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001. Now, in response to human abuse, nature itself has become the most terrible terrorist. We can reduce our carbon footprints by riding electric bikes or putting solar panels on our roofs or clearing “defensible space” around our homes, but really there’s no place to hide from certain forces.

The fix that we’re in as humans, and in such numbers as now plaguing the planet, is that our collective survival comes at the expense of our surroundings — and ultimately at our own expense. If we burn deadfall trees in our woodstoves, the smoke, as sweet as it may smell at first whiff, will kill us even as it keeps us from freezing. It’s only a matter of time before, in order to protect public health, wood heat will be outlawed just as the backyard trash incinerators of L.A. were in the 1950s. Yet alternative fuels like natural gas, propane and other oils contribute their own environmental corruption. And you think windmills and solar panels don’t use up natural resources?

But look at it this way. The silver lining or golden glow of a warming globe may mean that if temperatures rise enough we won’t need to heat our homes at all in the milder winters, and in El Niño years we can save the acre-feet of drenching rains in tanks and artificial aquifers whose salvaged water we can use for bathing during summer droughts. Humans up to now have proved creative enough to mitigate at least some of the problems they’ve caused. As cities are engulfed by rising seas, razed by drought-powered firestorms, frack-quaked to rubble by oil extraction and blown away by cyclones, more of us than ever will be refugees improvising survival out of whatever techniques we’re clever enough to invent.